Quick Overview: LEGOs serve as an educational tool across diverse fields by fostering creativity, critical thinking, and practical understanding of principles in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.

LEGO bricks not only make it easier to master various kinds of knowledge, but they can also turn your free time into something fun and colorful.

You’ve probably heard that LEGO is no longer just a toy for babies and young children—it’s also widely used in education. And we’re not just talking about primary or secondary school education; even in university courses and research projects, LEGO has found a place.

If you’re wondering what LEGO bricks can do beyond just playing in a university setting, the answer is: a lot!

LEGO products span across a wide range of fields like science, physics, mechanics, technology, architecture, engineering, arts, math, design, programming, and educational projects. It’s almost like they’re capable of anything!

LEGO Art, LEGO Creator, LEGO Dots for Art Majors

Art majors, as one of the twelve major fields of study, can greatly benefit from using LEGO bricks to enhance their aesthetic and design skills. For students in fields like animation, environmental design, fashion design, painting, sculpture, and fine arts, we highly recommend LEGO Art, LEGO Creator, LEGO Dots, and other themed sets. These can be a fun and effective way to develop creativity and a deeper understanding of design principles.

LEGO bricks, with their wide range of colors and endless creative possibilities, offer powerful tools for students in fields like fine arts, painting, environmental design, and more. They help foster abstract thinking by encouraging exploration in areas such as color theory, composition, spatial design, and 3D modeling. Using LEGO can effectively nurture creativity, design skills, and artistic expression.

For example, with sets like 31213 Mona Lisa, 31208 Hokusai – The Great Wave, and 31200 LEGO Art – Star Wars: The Sith, students can learn how these designers distill the colors and shapes from the original works, master the play of light and shadow, and refine and simplify the essence of the pieces. These sets offer a hands-on way to study and appreciate the intricacies of design and composition.

At the same time, using LEGO bricks to simulate the layout of different elements and experimenting with various composition techniques can spark creative ideas for poster design or color combinations. Not to mention, after spending some time with LEGO Art sets, you’ll definitely become a pro at mosaic and pop art!

In another area of the arts—music—international creators like Rare Beasts have even built a sequencer using LEGO bricks. They managed to make it play different sounds based on the colors, blending art with engineering and programming in the process. It’s a great example of how LEGO can cross boundaries and inspire creativity in multiple fields!

Design Majors

For design majors, using LEGO bricks to visualize and express design concepts is a perfect fit. Students in fields like graphic design, architecture, interior design, and product design can use LEGO as a creative medium to bring their ideas to life in a tangible form. It’s a hands-on way to transform concepts into physical representations, making the design process even more dynamic and interactive.

With nearly 10,000 different types of pieces, LEGO bricks offer an incredibly wide variety of shapes that can be used to simulate composition elements in graphic design or create 3D models for class projects. The sheer diversity of pieces makes LEGO a versatile tool for both 2D and 3D design tasks.

By using LEGO bricks to build 3D models, you can effectively translate your designs into 2D visuals, enhancing your understanding of depth and spatial relationships. The accurate proportions and structural details help improve your grasp of scale, proportion, and the spatial dynamics found in architecture and interior design.

Using LEGO bricks to simulate the layout of different elements and experiment with various compositions can also provide creative inspiration for poster design. By arranging LEGO pieces into different patterns, you can explore ideas for packaging design, fabric patterns, and more.

Even if you’re not in any of the design fields mentioned, you can still find inspiration by simply playing around with LEGO bricks. They can help spark ideas for solving problems you’re facing at the moment, like this one:

Chemistry-related Fields

Yes, you read that right—LEGO bricks can even be useful in chemistry-related fields. Students in chemistry, materials science, chemical engineering, polymer chemistry, and similar disciplines can benefit from them. While most LEGO bricks are made from ABS plastic, that’s not the only material used by the LEGO Group.

What’s the difference between cellulose acetate, high-impact polystyrene, polypropylene, polyethylene, polycarbonate, and polyoxymethylene? By studying and distinguishing these materials, you can gain a solid understanding of different types of plastic products and their properties. There’s even a wealth of research articles on LEGO materials in academic circles. You’d be surprised to learn that LEGO Group has a team of chemists working behind the scenes!

At Imperial College London, there was an undergraduate project that incorporated LEGO bricks. The professor had students use LEGO to build containers capable of holding a spectrometer, helping them develop a better understanding of complex scientific instruments.

Dr. Kristelle Bougot-Robin from the Department of Chemistry also participated in the project. She said, “LEGO bricks are an excellent medium for students to understand spectrometers, and we thought it would add a bit of fun to the lab. We chose to use them because they are an easy-to-use building material, and everyone is familiar with them.”

At the University of Iowa, during an experiment on the impact of soil on plant roots, researchers chose a transparent LEGO piece made from polycarbonate as a modular experimental container. This transparent LEGO can be sterilized, has a certain level of chemical inertness, and is less likely to react with surrounding materials, making it an ideal choice for biological cultivation work. It also allows for easy observation of the growth process and root changes.

Mechanical Engineering and Automation

For students in fields like mechanical engineering, automation, AI, and other engineering disciplines, there’s hardly a better educational tool than LEGO bricks. With sets like LEGO Technic and LEGO Mindstorms, you can explore mechanical principles, structural design, and hands-on prototyping. These sets also allow you to practice programming for automation and foster creative problem-solving. In fact, LEGO can even be used to build laboratory research instruments. If you’re a beginner, you can start with simpler mechanical sets or the LEGO Boost series to ease into the concepts.

Unlike regular LEGO bricks, the LEGO Technic series (Mechanical Sets) includes a variety of complex mechanical components, such as gears with different gear ratios, piston rods, drive shafts, differentials, shock absorbers, universal joints, chains, and more. These sets are designed to give a deeper understanding of mechanical engineering and allow for more intricate builds.

Not only can you recreate various mechanical structures and make them function, but these pieces also allow you to learn fundamental mechanical principles like gear transmission, lever mechanics, suspension systems, and different types of mechanical motion.

You can even simulate pneumatic systems, Schmidt couplings, slider-crank linkages, oscillating conveyors, Chebyshev linkages, Scottish yoke mechanisms, and all sorts of mechanical structures you can imagine. By combining these components, you can create the exact mechanical systems you need.

Once you master these principles and component functions, the next step is building fully operational machines. From page-turning clocks to looms, typewriters, paper airplane machines, cranes, cyclers, and conveyor belts—there’s no mechanical creation too complex for LEGO bricks to handle! If you can imagine it, you can build it.

It gets even cooler with the LEGO Mindstorms robot sets! With versions like RCX, NXT, EV3, and Robot Inventor, you can program the LEGO controllers and combine them with mechanical components to create operational structures. By adding motors, touch sensors, color sensors, infrared sensors, gyroscopic sensors, and more, you can write code to control these mechanical systems. This allows you to design and build automated robots that simulate CNC (computer numerical control) functions.

These types of sets can also be used in fields like dynamics and materials science. By hands-on building, you can gain a deeper understanding of how mechanical systems work and their processes, while also applying theoretical knowledge to real-world projects.

Building a Rubik’s Cube-solving robot using LEGO Mindstorms and Technic components is just a basic starting point. With strict adherence to standard requirements, LEGO bricks are manufactured to such precise standards that their size tolerance can be controlled within 1/2000th of a millimeter. On average, only 18 defective pieces are found in every 1 million LEGO bricks produced. The high level of standardization and systematization of LEGO bricks means that the models created can even be used to replace some expensive lab-grade equipment.

A research team at the University of Cambridge, working on an artificial bone experiment, used LEGO bricks to build an automated LEGO robot in order to streamline and eliminate the repetitive, tedious steps in the process. The robot replaced manual tasks such as placing the sample, waiting, lifting the sample, and rotating it—all of which were repeated continuously.

In a corner of a lab at Cardiff University, a multidisciplinary team of engineers and biologists used a lab-specific pump combined with LEGO bricks, Technic components, and the LEGO Mindstorms system to design, build, and program a functional bioprinter. Their evaluation of this “instrument” was that it was both affordable and high-spec, with a production cost of just $624.

They actually use this LEGO 3D bioprinter for experiments. The core of the device is a LEGO Mindstorms processor, and the nozzle sprays a gel-like substance filled with cells onto a petri dish. The device moves the dish back and forth, side to side, according to the programmed sequence, while the nozzle moves up and down mechanically, extruding the cell-filled gel. These programmed movements build up cell layers, replicating the 3D structure of human tissue, layer by layer.

Faculty and staff from the University of Maryland’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in collaboration with scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), designed an affordable, autonomous experimental setup made from the LEGO Mindstorms system. The goal was to help students understand the concepts of robotics, with computer algorithms determining the sequence of each experimental task based on previous results.

I was originally planning to dive deeper into the specific use of the LEGO automation device created at the University of Maryland, but I must admit I couldn’t quite figure it out. It mainly involves using computer programming, AI algorithms to drive autonomous decision-making, and practical training in machine learning and AI. There are actually many other cases where LEGO mechanical systems are used in real experiments like this…

Architecture

Of course, we’re not talking about the more grueling civil engineering disciplines here, like cost estimation, municipal engineering, geotechnical, plumbing, or project management. What we’re focusing on are the design-oriented fields within architecture, such as architectural design, landscape design, interior design, environmental planning, and both domestic and international architecture. These students often face the grueling late-night grind of building architectural models.

LEGO bricks can be used to showcase various aspects of architecture, such as model-making and spatial understanding, architectural structures and engineering principles, urban planning and landscape design, innovative design and prototype testing, as well as historical building research.

On June 1, 2024, LEGO launched the 21061 Notre Dame de Paris set in celebration of the iconic cathedral’s history and architectural beauty. The set, built to a 1:340 scale, recreates the nearly 700-year-old structure in stunning detail.

This set definitely deserves to be highlighted on its own, apart from the other LEGO Architecture sets. Not only does it faithfully recreate the exterior appearance of Notre Dame de Paris, but the architectural structure—both inside and out—is intricately connected. The pieces you see on the building’s exterior are also used to replicate the interior, providing a clear, visual understanding of how the building’s elements are interrelated.

What’s even more impressive is that the assembly sequence follows the actual construction process of the cathedral. With each completed bag of pieces, you’ll see how the church evolved over time from 1163 to 1345, representing 183 years of development. It’s one of the most immersive and tangible ways to understand the construction of a building in such a fragmented yet intuitive manner.

You can find architectural icons that are frequently mentioned in textbooks, like the Sears Tower, Fallingwater, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Robie House, and more, all represented in official LEGO Architecture sets.

In the LEGO ICONS and Creator Expert series, you’ll find incredibly detailed, highly accurate models. Sets like Old Trafford (Manchester United’s stadium), the Santiago Bernabéu (Real Madrid’s stadium), the Eiffel Tower, and the Sydney Opera House are so meticulously designed, that they could easily be used as teaching tools.

These LEGO architecture models offer a more hands-on way to learn about architectural history and design principles. They help explore structural stability and building materials. Of course, we can’t solve real-world structural or load-bearing issues with plastic bricks, but the main benefit is gaining an understanding of the design process and bringing architectural concepts to life through LEGO.

With the help of various pieces like hoses, hinges, and pins, along with techniques such as SNOT (Studs Not On Top), inversion, and rotation, even the simple block shapes of LEGO bricks have endless creative possibilities. Take the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York, for example. Its asymmetrical, bird-wing-like design, full of dynamic tension, can be faithfully recreated with LEGO bricks.

What we really want to highlight, though, is LEGO’s inherent creative potential. Using this medium, you can fully bring your design concepts to life. It’s far more practical and efficient than using materials like corrugated cardboard, cardstock, PVC sheets, or wood.

You don’t even have to limit yourself to architecture alone—LEGO can be a valuable tool for site planning, historic building design, landscape architecture, urban planning, and interior design. I even have a friend who used LEGO creations to complete their graduation project!

Perhaps many of you have already experienced the magic of LEGO, but this article aims to introduce you to this incredible tool from a fresh perspective. How do you usually use LEGO? Do you follow the instructions step by step to build official sets? Do you let your creativity run wild and create MOC (My Own Creation) models? Or maybe you experiment with complex mechanical and programming builds? Feel free to share your LEGO stories in the comments!